At first glance, the position of the United Kingdom’s (UK) new government toward Palestine appears to diverge little from US policy. But a closer look at the Labor Party’s first hundred days in office reveals small shifts, indicating that the government is susceptible to domestic pressure on the Palestine issue. This pressure, and Israel’s increasing isolation on the global stage as it escalates its genocidal campaign against Gaza, may eventually lead to a necessary change in the UK’s stance.
A Shallow Labor Victory
After 14 straight years of Conservative government, Labor’s Keir Starmer claimed victory in the July 5 election, and in his maiden speech promised to ‘deliver change.’ In the UK’s first past the post electoral system, the Labor party secured 411 out of 650 seats. While this looked like a landslide victory, in fact the election was marked by voters’ lack of love for either of the two major parties.
Political commentators referenced a Conservative ‘implosion’ as the party suffered its worst defeat in history, with much of its vote share going to the new right-wing Reform (formerly ‘Brexit’) Party. One in five voters had indicated that they would vote tactically, in most cases to keep a Conservative candidate from winning the seat, as opposed to casting a positive vote for Labor. With the lowest turnout since the 1920s, Starmer’s Labor Party secured a mere 33.7 percent of the vote share—the lowest for a governing party in the post-World War II period. Now, after one hundred days in office, Starmer’s approval ratings have plummeted to their lowest level ever—well below those of the deeply unpopular outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak.
With both Sunak and Starmer repeatedly declaring unconditional support for Israel’s ‘right to self-defense,’ there has been little discernible difference between the two parties’ positions on Palestine.
Of particular significance was the role that Israel’s assault on Gaza played in voters’ choices. With both Sunak and Starmer repeatedly declaring unconditional support for Israel’s ‘right to self-defense,’ there has been little discernible difference between the two parties’ positions on Palestine. On October 11, 2023, Starmer, with background as a human rights lawyer, stated that Israel “has the right” to withhold power and water from Gaza—an act of collective punishment and a war crime under international law. The decision by both major parties to shield an occupying power from accountability as it wreaked devastation on the occupied population of Gaza, and while the horrific images of lifeless bodies—including thousands of children—circulated on social media, horrified British citizens looked to vote elsewhere.
And vote elsewhere many did. The Green Party, which centered Palestine in its manifesto, earned 7 percent of the vote, its best UK election result to date. Six independent candidates were elected to parliament—former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn and other previously unknown individuals running solely on an anti-genocide platform. This was an unprecedented phenomenon in terms of both the number of successful independents in the UK’s electoral system and the influence of foreign policy on a general election. Several other seats were closely contested, resulting in near misses. One noteworthy example was 23-year-old British-Palestinian Leanne Mohamad, who came within 528 votes of beating Wes Streeting, the man widely tipped to be the next Labor leader, in her home constituency of Ilford North.
Arab and Muslim voters played a significant role in the election, with organizations such as The Muslim Vote created to endorse candidates based on their stance on Gaza. As traditionally Labor-supporting Arabs, Muslims, and other racialized communities took a stand against genocide and held their elected representatives to account, racist and Islamophobic sentiment increased. Far-right racist attacks, which swept through the country in August, betrayed the interconnectedness of Britain’s hostile foreign policy toward Palestine and the erosion of civil liberties at home.
The First Hundred Days: Half Measures Amidst a Genocide
Considering the Labor leadership’s evident support for Israel, it is unsurprising that the three steps taken by the new government regarding Palestine have been minimal.
The first two steps represented reversals of policies by the previous Conservative government, which, even by UK standards, were extreme. One was to resume funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which the Sunak government had suspended. By the time Labor came into power on July 5, the United Kingdom, along with the United States, remained the only two major donors to continue suspending funding to the agency. This was despite the European Union’s (EU) top humanitarian official stating that Israel had failed to provide any evidence of its claims that a small number of UNRWA employees aided the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and at a time when approximately 1.9 million Palestinians in Gaza had been displaced and rights groups described levels of hunger and starvation as ‘catastrophic.’ On July 19, the Starmer government announced that it would be restoring funding to the agency.
By the time Labor came into power on July 5, the United Kingdom, along with the United States, remained the only two major donors to continue suspending funding to UNRWA.
The second step was to reverse the Conservative government’s objection to International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan’s May 2024 announcement that he would seek arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant along with three Hamas leaders. In July, the Conservative government filed the first amicus brief objecting to the warrants and arguing that the ICC lacks jurisdiction. This opened the way for a wave of submissions from other parties, which served to delay the warrant process. Later that month, the incoming Labor administration dropped the UK’s objection to the warrants, a move that Geoffrey Robertson, the former president of the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone, and Starmer’s former boss, described as Labor’s “first moral test in power.”
The third step was Starmer’s September 2 suspension of 30 (out of 350) UK weapons export licenses to Israel. Human rights defenders, including major human rights organizations, criticized the move for affecting less than 10 percent of such licenses, particularly since under the Sunak government Labor had led the charge to push then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron to publish a legal assessment of the likelihood of Israel’s violating International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and of potential UK liability for continuing to approve arms sales. UK suspensions of arms sales to Israel have precedent. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did so after the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon over which Israeli forces presided, and Cameron himself, as prime minister, ordered a suspension during Israel’s 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip.
The result is a series of fudged policies that those recognizing Israel’s actions as genocidal consider wholly insufficient, while also drawing the ire of Israel and its supporters.
On the ICC arrest warrants, it could have been that the United States requested the amicus brief, as Washington is not a party to the Rome Statute that created the court and therefore could not intervene directly. At any rate, by the time Labor came into power, the brief had already managed to delay ICC proceedings by opening the door to other submissions. Whatever the truth, both US and Israeli officials have expressed strong opposition to the ICC, rendering the UK decision to drop its objection to Khan’s warrants request a departure from this position.
The suspension of some weapons licenses prompted heavy backlash from the Israeli government and supporters of Israel. The Labor government’s statement that “there is a clear risk certain military exports to Israel might be used in violations of International Humanitarian Law” makes its partial suspension an incoherent and untenable position, and has invited further criticism and legal challenges.
Two Levers of Pressure
Seen in this light, Labor’s policy decisions suggest two levers of pressure at work. One is domestic in that Labor needs to show something on Palestine to its electorate. The other is international and concerns a reluctance to completely depart from mainstream legal and international consensus. Both motivations may also be relevant in the United States.
Regarding domestic pressure, as in the United Kingdom, the nature of the American electoral system means that no matter which party wins in November, the United States will continue to support Israel. However, there are similar indicators related to public opinion in both countries that may for the first time punch through the policy-making sphere.
Not unlike the United Kingdom in the run-up to the July election, the United States has candidates and campaigns explicitly standing on an anti-genocide platform, including Green Party candidate Jill Stein and the Uncommitted Movement. Democratic voters’ opinion on Gaza is a key part of debate leading up to the November 5 vote. The October 13 joint letter by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III to the Israeli government that threatened halting arms shipments if Israel continues to prevent humanitarian aid into Gaza, suggests that the Biden administration is aware that genocide is not a good look on the eve of an election.
In both countries, human rights defenders and ordinary citizens are highlighting US and UK complicity in Israeli atrocities via weapons exports and seeking legal redress. The Center for Constitutional Rights sued the Biden administration in November 2023. And in the United Kingdom, a coalition including Al-Haq, Global Legal Action Network, Amnesty International, and others are taking the British government to court.
Meanwhile, public opinion in both countries continues to shift—a 2024 May poll found that a majority of Democratic voters in the United States believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, while the same percentage in the United Kingdom supports the suspension of arms sales to Israel. Marches and demonstrations for justice in Palestine have continued in both countries for the past year—in the United Kingdom marking the biggest protest movement in recent history. Student encampments, which proliferated across US campuses last spring and spread to Britain and beyond, have been reminiscent of those set up during the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.
Despite a host of increasingly repressive attempts by US and UK authorities to silence protest, criminalize boycotts, and prevent divestment from Israel and companies investing there, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement continues to make gains as more individual citizens, companies, and public bodies seek to make ethical choices and end their complicity in genocide.
Despite a host of increasingly repressive attempts by US and UK authorities to criminalize boycotts, the BDS movement continues to make gains.
The second lever is international pressure. As Israel escalates its assault across Gaza and the occupied West Bank and now into Lebanon, its international isolation is growing. This isolation extends to some of Israel’s allies, most notably Britain and the United States. A February 2024 UN Security Council vote on a ceasefire testifies to this: all 13 members voted in favor except for the United Kingdom, which abstained, and the United States, which used its veto power against the resolution. The two countries were, as the Guardian put it, virtually alone in intervening to shield Israel during hearings on the unlawful nature of its occupation at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and were in a minority of countries abstaining or voting in September against the UN General Assembly resolution to end Israel’s unlawful occupation. As Spain has joined South Africa’s apartheid and genocide case against Israel at the ICJ, and as a dozen countries have declared their intention to join, it seems likely that this isolation will increase.
The European Union’s foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, has neatly summarized the growing dilemma faced by the international community. “We will have to choose between our support to the international institutions and the rule of law, or our support to Israel, and both things is [sic] going to be quite difficult to make compatible,” Borrell said.
The United Kingdom, although no longer a part of the EU, remains geographically a part of Europe. Unlike the United States, it is a signatory to the Rome Statute. The new Labor government, for all its attempts to shield Israel from accountability, does profess respect for international law and mechanisms of justice such as the ICC and ICJ, making it difficult to completely abandon these supposed principles.
US administrations may not care about international law per se, or even about isolation, but this may change if the balance can be shifted enough—through both domestic and international pressure—so that the cost-benefit calculation for supporting Israel is no longer justifiable. With Netanyahu pushing for regional escalation as his only option for holding on to power, the United States and the United Kingdom, in continuing to provide aid, weapons, and military personnel, will start to feel the cost of a problem that cannot be solved militarily.
Conclusion and Recommendations
The impact of Palestine on the recent UK election and the first hundred days of the new Labor government have created small but significant breakthroughs, denting the two-party system and translating public opinion into political pressure for the first time. In the longer term, this may turn out to be one small flicker of a paradigmatic shift capable of helping to bring a just resolution to the question of Palestine.
In the meantime, as voters prepare to go to the ballot box in the United States, and as Israel’s actions increase its isolation from international legal and moral consensus, US and UK policymakers should reassess their support for Israeli actions. In short, they should consider whether it serves their respective national interests to continue adhering to old policies and practices.
Palestinians, human rights defenders, activists, and people of conscience in the United States should look to the United Kingdom and take renewed heart in the fact that voters can have an effect on their elected representatives. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, activists should continue to build connections, share best practices, and nurture alliances in service of a just future for all.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Michael Tubi
